GSS, Solving CSS Issues with JavaScript and HTML5

With the goal of overcoming issues inherent with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), The Grid announced the launch of GSS (Grid Style Sheets) this week. GSS is an open source library that leverages JavaScript and HTML5 and is intended to solve UI layout issues, which The Grid describes as one of the most frustrating problems with the Web as a platform. Developers can also choose GSS as an alternative to the Famo.us JavaScript framework since Famo.us treats the browser more like a game engine to get around issues with CSS, GSS takes care of CSS shortcomings. GSS is based on constraint programming, a paradigm where developers focus on declaring the "what" in a program and rely on a mathematical solver to figure out "how." Constraint programming is a natural fit for declarative languages such as CSS, the company said. GSS extends CSS with new layout languages and replaces the browser's layout engine, using the Cassowary Constraint Solver algorithm that is used by Apple to compute native layout. Click here to read the full story.